Why, as a Christian, I welcome taking ‘The God Delusion’ to the stage

It’s finally happened. Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (TGD) is to be put on the stage. Chorlton Arts Festival in England is going to have the first theatre version of the best selling atheist book.

I think it is a highly appropriate idea for TGD, which is after all an entertaining piece of propaganda, rather than a serious academic work. In fact I can’t wait for the film version and perhaps the spin off series. Fans of TGD regard it with all the reverence of holy writ and see it as a life-changing book that ‘should be placed in every school’ (nothing like a little atheist indoctrination!). Dawkins’s own website had a ‘converts corner’ where people could give their testimony about how they ‘saw the light’.

Thomas Moore, the artistic director of the company that will perform the play certainly thinks it is a transforming work. ‘The only way to describe the show is a light-hearted journey through the sound reasoning that the book so brilliantly details,’ he said. ‘It’s somewhere between an atheist support group and watching a great stand-up comedian. We hope that when people leave the show they feel changed.’

I have to confess that I too found reading The God Delusion a life changing experience. Not because I was persuaded by its arguments – which are largely a rehash of Bertrand Russell’s Why I am not a Christian. In fact as atheist books go it’s an embarrassment to many thinking atheists (there are some!).